This 2006 initiative is being carried forward by the American Planning Association, the Global Planners Network, and other forums:
Purpose: The draft of the Vancouver Declaration commits planning professionals around the world to work together to tackle the challenges of rapid urbanisation, the urbanisation of poverty and the hazards posed by climate change and natural disasters.
Why? Time is short. Today, for the first time in the world’s history, the majority of its population live in cities. Urban development is rapid, and its impacts are long-lasting. Unless urban areas can be made more sustainable, and rural life more tolerable, the legacy of negative environmental and social costs will become irreversible. If current trends go unchecked:
Urban poverty will become pervasive. In 2002 30 percent of the world’s urban population lived in poverty; in current trends this figure will become 45-50 percent by 2020, some 1.6 billion people.
The numbers of environmental refugees, people displaced by more frequent and severe disasters as the global climate changes, will mount. The pollutants and greenhouse gases generated by our rapidly spreading urban areas are motors of climate change.
Cities will continue to provide a refuge for those escaping conflict zones, but will increasingly become places of crime and terrorism.
The combination of these threats amounts to a crisis that is global, systematic and already discernable. Yet much policy-making remains reactive, and presumes that urban development is only a local matter, and that natural disasters and outbreaks of urban unrest are random events. Practices built on these foundations are programmed to fail. In contrast, New Urban Planning means being proactive, focused on sustainability, and making the connections between people, economic opportunity and the environment. That is why planning is central to a new paradigm for governance of human settlements.